As outrage in Europe grows, lawmakers are defending U.S. surveillance practices — including phone tapping — and saying other nations likely engage in similar spying, even if their leaders don’t know it.

Top members of Congress also suggest that Germany, France and other nations should be thankful for, rather than angry about, American snooping.

“It needs to be overseen and we need to be sure we’re not collecting information we don’t need, but we should collect information that’s helpful to the United States’ interests,” Rep. Mike Rogers, Michigan Republican and chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said during an interview Sunday on CBS‘ “Face the Nation.”

“If the French citizens knew exactly what that was about, they would be applauding and popping champagne corks. It’s a good thing. It keeps the French safe. It keeps the U.S. safe. It keeps our European allies safe,” he said. “This whole notion that we’re going to go after each other on what is really legitimate protection of nation-state interest, I think is disingenuous.”

Mr. Rogers made the comments, echoed by other leading Republicans, amid reports that the U.S. conducted mass surveillance of French citizens.

Even more damning, the German magazine Der Spiegel has reported that American intelligence services have been monitoring the phone calls of German Chancellor Angela Merkel since 2002, long before she assumed her post.

The magazine relies on “leaked documents” that reveal the depth of U.S. spying and represent the latest in a string of revelations that began this year when former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden released a massive amount of data related to U.S. intelligence-gathering techniques.

She and President Obama spoke on the phone last week after the initial charges came to light, but the White House has refused to say whether it spied on Ms. Merkel in the past.

Officials have said only that the U.S. is not doing such snooping now, nor will it do so in the future. That’s hardly enough for angry German leaders.

“If the Americans intercepted cellphones in Germany, they broke German law on German soil,” said Hans-Peter Freidrich, the nation’s interior minister, adding that “those responsible must be held accountable.”

Although many questions remain about exactly what U.S. intelligence services are doing, one thing is clear: It’s been going on for many years.

“It’s nothing new. … It’s something that we’ve been involved in for a long time,” former Vice President Dick Cheney said during an interview Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”

Mr. Cheney refused to discuss specific cases or accusations and made clear he was referring only to intelligence-gathering in a general sense.

Some of history’s most famous espionage cases involved spying on allies, including American Jonathan Pollard’s activities against the U.S. on behalf of Israel and Britons Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess. Though the three men also were active during the early Cold War era, their work for the Soviet Union included the years of World War II, when Britain and the Soviet Union were allies.